John Edwards opens law firm

John Edwards is opening a new law firm with his daughter, Cate, according to a report.

“It is a privilege to practice again, and we want to take on cases that, through litigation, change social inequalities in favor of the greater good,” Edwards said in a statement, WRAL in North Carolina reported. “In building Edwards Kirby, we sought a team that has championed the causes of economic and social equality in court and in hundreds of communities across the country.”

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The firm will join the ex-North Carolina senator and presidential candidate with his former law partner, David Kirby, and will have offices in Raleigh, N.C., as well as Washington, D.C.

Cate Edwards will also join the firm with her legal partner; she said the goal of the practice will be to help those without a voice.

“His life’s mission, I think, has been to help people,” Cate Edwards told WRAL News about her father. “Edwards Kirby is founded for that purpose – to give people a voice, to give the disenfranchised a voice.”

It was first announced that Edwards would go back to law earlier this summer, after he had reactivated his law license.

He has been otherwise largely out of the public eye since May 2012, when he was acquitted of misusing campaign donations to hide an affair during the 2008 election. A jury deadlocked on other counts, but the prosecution declined to retry him.

Cate Edwards told WRAL the firm is not a launching pad for a new political campaign for her father.